Some winter mornings at Eldora feel like an initiation. The wind scrapes across the ridge, the lift glides overhead, and everything takes on a kind of metallic clarity. I was riding the chair on one of those mornings, thinking about ski boots, about the stories that swirl around them, and about the people who taught us how to care about feet in plastic.
I hear it a lot: Larry’s Bootfitting fits boots notoriously tight. My wife and I worked for Larry for five years, and I can say without hesitation that Larry did fit tight. It was not indecision or laziness. It was a belief system. Larry believed that performance comes from connection. When the boot is an extension of the body rather than a padded chamber, the ski listens. A snug boot makes demands, but it also responds. That responsiveness was the whole point for Larry.
There are stories about him. The rumor about growing up on a Blackfoot reservation, being teased for having big feet, and getting revenge by putting every skier in a shell that was one size smaller than sanity. Skiers love stories like that because lore travels faster than nuance. Maybe there was truth to it, maybe nothing at all. The real truth was simpler: Larry believed that a precise boot could teach you something about your skiing that comfort never could.
Before Larry, Elaine and I learned to fit boots at Neptune Mountaineering. That world answered a different set of problems. Gary Neptune had climbed Everest. He had spent more time in the mountains than most people spend in their cars. His feet had frozen, blistered, lived inside plastic for weeks. He knew what boots had to do when failure had consequences. Gary believed in thick wool socks, circulation, and volume. A boot should give you enough room to survive the mountain you were walking into, not just the run beneath the lift. If Larry was obsessed with the perfect transfer of power into an edge, Gary was obsessed with what happens when you have to cross a glacier in the dark, or ski eight hours out of a storm system.
It still makes me laugh how two legends could take the same object and arrive at opposite religions. Larry and Gary rarely agreed on comfort, on sizing, or on philosophy, but they shared the same intensity. Neither approach was gentle. Both were born out of real lives spent in snow.
Working at Neptune taught us respect for the body in the mountains. Working at Larry’s taught us respect for the ski beneath your feet. In one shop, boots were survival equipment. In the other, they were tools of control. Somewhere between those two worlds, Elaine and I found our voice. When we eventually took the shop over and began training our own crew, we realized how lucky we were. We carry Gary’s understanding of what the mountain can do to a person, and Larry’s insistence that a ski boot is not a bedroom slipper. We hand that blended perspective to the next generation. They hear the legends, they learn the extreme positions, and then we teach them the most important thing: listen to the skier.
Bootfitting attracts strong personalities, and there is an old-school mindset that the fitter is the authority and the skier is the one who must accept discomfort. The verdict is always downsizing. If your toes hurt, you’re “doing it right.” I have no patience for that. Skiing is not obedience. Skiing is expression. The boot is the instrument.
Some people need a violin. Some need an electric guitar. Some need a drum kit. You don’t hand everyone a Stradivarius and say “good luck.” A beginner will be terrified of it. A jazz musician will be bored. A punk rocker might split it clean in half. The right instrument is the one that lets you play your own music, not someone else’s.
I grew up ski racing. I was lucky. People paid attention to my feet. That shaped how I work now. I treat every customer like their performance matters, but that does not mean fitting them like they are chasing downhill medals. I think of bootfitting like a race team garage. The skier is the driver. We are the mechanics. They bring feedback. We make adjustments. They try again. The loop is where discovery lives.
On that cold morning at Eldora, my own boots were snug but not punishing. I have a 9.5 D width foot and I ski a Tecnica Mach1 MV 130 in a 26.5. It is not a race fit, but it skis beautifully and lets me enjoy the mountain. Larry would have put me in a 25.5. Maybe I could ski it. Maybe I could even ski it well. But I am older now, I ski most days, and I want to spend my bandwidth on the terrain, not on my toes. I keep the same boot in LV too. When I’m sharp and the snow is clean, I take the LV and treat the hill like a racetrack. It rips. But eight mornings out of ten, when I’m tired or need an extra cup of coffee or my feet are grumpy, I take the MV. There is wisdom in that choice. The instrument still plays, but the song lasts all day.
People still walk into the shop expecting the myth: that we will force them down two shell sizes, tape their toenails, and send them out grinning through the pain. That rumor will probably chase us forever. It reminds me of where we came from. It reminds me that snugness and connection matter. But it also reminds me what we’ve built. We do not fit for legend. We fit for people. We listen. We respect physiology, goals, and personality every bit as much as performance.
We were fortunate to be trained by legends. Gary Neptune knew what boots must do when the mountain is not interested in letting you leave. Larry knew what boots must do when you want to carve a line so clean it feels like you invented it. Elaine and I stand somewhere in the space between those philosophies. We weave their knowledge with our own miles on snow, our injuries, our successes, our failures. The generation working beside us will move that needle again. They will take what we give them and reshape it, just as we reshaped what was handed to us. The craft is not static. It is passed down like a favorite chord progression or a local backcountry skintrack.
In the end, ski boots are not just plastic and hardware. They are a musician’s instrument, and every skier has their own music to make. If there were one correct solution, Larry and Gary would have agreed. They never did. That is the gift they left us. The real art of bootfitting lives in the space between passion and listening, between knowledge and curiosity, between the instrument you think someone should play and the one that allows them to ski the mountain with joy.
2 comments
Bravo!!!
Testing if this even works!